national church and in her transplanted condition, the Lutheran church
will remain an important factor in the development of Protestant
Christianity.

When our Reformed neighbors charge us with Romanism, it is either
because they do not understand our theory and have overlooked the
historical development, or because they judge of us by the Romish
practice of our own ministers who have thoughtlessly slipped over too
far toward the institutional theory. In the present condition of
religious flux we have a mission not only in the field of doctrine, but
also in practical theology, on the question of the Church. For we are
still standing between two antagonists. Catholics on the one hand
attract the masses by the definiteness of their external organization.
Over against them we emphasize the essentially spiritual nature of the
Church. There are Protestants on the other hand who, while placing the
emphasis on the inner life, ignore the importance of the ordinances.
They maintain public worship, it is true, but do so in combination with
secular entertainment or by appealing to the intellectual or esthetic
needs of the community. Others, more spiritually minded, base their
hopes on the evangelist and the revival. But when the evangelist has
taken his leave, and the people have to listen to the same voice they
have heard so long before, having been thoroughly indoctrinated with the
idea that it is not the Church that makes a man a Christian, that
sacraments and ordinances are merely human devices, is it any wonder
that many of them ignore the church altogether?

It is here that the Lutheran Church, with her catholic spirit and her
evangelical doctrine, has a message for our times. Her doctrine of
baptism, of Christian instruction as its corrollary, of repentance,
faith, and the new life, of the Lord's Supper, of church attendance, of